


Skirmishes

by Frellywellies



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 15:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6013579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frellywellies/pseuds/Frellywellies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miss Anne Hastings reflects upon some critical mis-steps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skirmishes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercuryGray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/gifts).



You’ve done it once again, Anne. Backed the _wrong damn horse_ , despite all of the signs, all of the clues right in front of your face.

This is the Crimea all over again.

And Paris.

And London before that.

Can a woman of 28 (fine, 32) years really have learned so little in all that time? Byron had seemed like _such_ a certainty, though. By far the most experienced and accomplished of the staff and as eager as any of them to jump upon anything in petticoats; he was the sort of man I had known from my first bloom of womanhood. He was also desperately childlike, in need of a cool hand on his brow and someone to tell him how very strong and important he was. I have mothered enough wounded boys to know exactly how to deal with his sort.

Dr. Foster was only ever supposed to temporary. A civilian. A _married_ civilian, furthermore and seemingly happy enough with his lot in life. He was to be gone from us in a month but, alas, this is the way of war. It metastasizes. What is true now shall not be true tomorrow and the day after that is beyond speculation.

I forgot that. I became too fixated on one prospect when I should have been pursuing all available possibilities. I had gotten too comfortable here as the only woman under 60 who hadn’t pledged her chastity to Christ.

I did not expect that Boston minx.

Oh, how she repulses me. Telling me that we must work together, as though our shared sex makes us natural allies when she knows full well that “sisterhood” gets a woman nowhere. “Sisterhood” is what brought her to my hospital where I have been stationed for months and installed her above me on her very first day.

Her! A woman who cannot properly dress a wound or identify rot when she smells it, who begins to sweat when she sees blood!

The fact of the matter is, a woman does not rise in this world without the intervention and assistance of a man and the good Baroness knows this as well as I do, or else she would not have set her cap immediately for a married man.

Oh, she imagines herself very upright and proper with that meek little face. Why, Miss Mary Phinney would never seduce a man! She wouldn’t even know where to begin!

She might fool them all, Byron and Dr. Summers and even Matron Brannan (who has some inexplicable soft spot for her), but she does not fool me. I see her clearly, even if I am the only one who does.

I see, for example, how whenever she moves through a room now, Foster’s eyes follow her like a hound looking to its master for direction. I see how he brightens when she deigns to favor him with a smile. I see how he seeks her out and accompanies his every request with small gestures, little touches on her arm, her wrist, even occasionally her hip, as though his body is drawn organically towards her own.

That sort of attachment does not simply materialize from the air, not without some manner of cultivation on the part of a woman.

They imagine that they are sly, sharing their little secrets and their sidelong glances but this is a small hospital and it gets smaller with each new wounded boy who comes in. Very soon, there will be no dark corners for them to hide in.

My mistake, I see now, was to be too…available. Dr. Foster is clearly the sort of man who wants nothing so much as the thing that he cannot have. Miss Mary Phinney must have spotted that right away and exploited it perfectly. Oh yes, I saw them in that makeshift kitchen she insisted upon, standing far too close for mere colleagues. I saw him put his hands about her waist and the way she looked down, so doleful, as though she had anything to be sorrowful about!

I heard her as well when she whispered to him, “Jed, don’t…” It was as minutely choreographed as any ballet dance, from the defeated way he rested his forehead against hers to her shuddering sigh as she swayed first towards him and then away. Truly, it was an accomplished performance.

I saw as well the look upon his face when she extricated herself and left him; as though every single thing he had ever valued was walking away with her.

And, after all of that, of playing the chaste lady who could never bring herself to consort with someone else’s husband, whose footsteps did I hear in the hall last night? Who was that knocking oh-so-delicately at Dr. Foster’s door?

She took that man the same way she took my hospital and now she intends to ruin the both of them.

Anne, my girl, it seems you have been out-maneuvered by a very canny player indeed. This is a serious setback to be sure but if I have learned nothing else from my failures, I have learned at least how to start again.

One must never give in to despair. Not when there is so much war yet to be won.


End file.
